Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Module 11: Completing Your Unit

You are almost finished with your Unit Plan! You have now created an assessment plan, refelcted on your unit activities and wrapped up any loose ends in your plan.

As you reflect on the activities you completed in tonight's class, please answer the following question:

How do I create effective, authentic assessment?

How can I best provide constructive feedback for my peers and my students?

Once you have posted your thoughts, reply to the post of at least one other participant. You may ask them a question, comment on their good ideas, or even disagree (respectfully), as long as you are saying more then just, "I agree" or "Good job". Before entering your comments, please make sure to start with the person's name you are replying to, such as "@ Melodie" or "To Melodie".

23 comments:

Creating effective, authentic assessment has many "parts", but I think it involves goal setting, using a variety of assessment methods and instruments, and communicating with students on what is being assessed.

I can best provide constructive feedback to my peers by pointing out the postitives and happily accepting constuctive feedback from others.

I can create effective, authentic assessment by involving my students to help create rubrics. I believe that if students are actively involved in the grading process, they are more likely to take interest in the project. Also, the assessment must match the curriculum-framing questions and objectives (correct bloom’s level).

I can best provide constructive feedback for my peers and students by not only finding areas for improvement but also focusing on what they are doing well. It seems like everyone takes comments about areas that need improvement a little better if it is sandwiched between two positive comments. Also the feedback should be specific and frequent.

I think that to make an effective assessment I need to have solid idea of what it is that I want. When creating my tests, I make sure that I am creating questions that truly test what I want my students to demonstrate. When students are working on a project, I need to have a rubric that clearly defines my expectations other wise I can expect the students to be all other the place. For this project I liked the idea of having the students use a blog to ask questions, and share their ideas. I think it will be a great way to give feedback to the students regularly.

Creating rubrics is a great way to help students take ownership of the work that they do. With a rubric, they can have a clear understanding of the various levels of achievement. They know exactly what is expected of them. As well, students can be involved in the actual creation of the rubric. This process would help make the assessment more authentic as well as forcing them to use higher level thinking skills.

Sometimes it's easier to spot the areas of need, both in others. But when providing constructive feedback, it's imperative to provide positives as well. What am I doing well? What can I improve upon? I make sure to remind my kids that criticism isn't a bad thing. We all have things we need to work on. The only way to learn and grow is by being able to reflect on our own work and by accepting the criticism of others.

I really like the idea of using a blog to provide feedback. That really would force the kids to give their ideas some serious thought before they post a comment.

I also think that using the created rubric to plan the unit would be useful. By creating the rubric first, I would have a solid idea of the exact things I want my students to be able to do. Backwards design...

I create effective, authentic assessments by utilizing what teachers have done before and just tweaking it. By creating questions that promote higher learners and by giving opportunities to demonstrate a skill in more ways then one. I best provide constructive feedback for my peers and my students by using visual information and by providing examples of what I want.

To Talia and Bethany,I love that your students will create their own rubric. I wonder if their criteria and performance expectations would be similar to a teacher's or if they will have higher expectations of themselves.

How do I create effective, authentic assessment? I use assessments from prior years, and (like others have said) change them to meet the needs of my students in my current class. How can I best provide constructive feedback for my peers and my students? The best feedback is the immediate feedback. Once you let a day or two go by the feedback is not as meaningful.

How do I create effective, authentic assessment? I use assessments from prior years that have worked for me in the past. I have found that by trial and error, I have found what works best for me. How can I best provide constructive feedback for my peers and my students? To properly provide my students with feedback I like to use rubrics. This gives me the opportunity to show students the areas in which they lost points and why.

To Talia: I completely agree that we need to tell our students that criticism isn't necessarily a "bad thing". It can be hard to take criticism well and I think it takes practice. You made an excellent point Talia!

I create effective authenic feedback by looking at my standards to figure out what the students need to know and than base my assessment on those goals. Work backwards to figure out the needs of your students to get them to those final goals. Align this goals with real life situations so the students can make a connection.

Providing constructive feedback can be difficult to do so that you don't become to critical of a person work. You need to stay positive and point out the good points and strengths to help guide and improve the weak areas.